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Migrate on-premises machines to Azure

11/27/2018

5 minutes to read

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In this article

In addition to using the Azure Site Recovery service to manage and orchestrate disaster recovery of on-premises machines and Azure VMs for the purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), you can also use Site Recovery to manage migration of on-premises machines to Azure.

This tutorial shows you how to migrate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure. In this tutorial, you learn how to:

Select a replication goal

Set up the source and target environment

Set up a replication policy

Enable replication

Run a test migration to make sure everything's working as expected

Run a one-time failover to Azure

This is the third tutorial in a series. This tutorial assumes that you have already completed the tasks in the previous tutorials:

Enable replication

Run a test migration

Run a test failover to Azure, to make sure everything's working as expected.

Migrate to Azure

Run a failover for the machines you want to migrate.

In Settings > Replicated items click the machine > Failover.

In Failover select a Recovery Point to fail over to. Select the latest recovery point.

The encryption key setting isn't relevant for this scenario.

Select Shut down machine before beginning failover. Site Recovery will attempt to shutdown virtual machines before triggering the failover. Failover continues even if shutdown fails. You can follow the failover progress on the Jobs page.

Check that the Azure VM appears in Azure as expected.

In Replicated items, right-click the VM > Complete Migration. This does the following:

Finishes the migration process, stops replication for the AWS VM, and stops Site Recovery billing for the VM.

This step cleans up the replication data. It doesn't delete the migrated VMs.

Warning

Don't cancel a failover in progress: VM replication is stopped before failover starts. If you cancel a failover in progress, failover stops, but the VM won't replicate again.

In some scenarios, failover requires additional processing that takes around eight to ten minutes to complete. You might notice longer test failover times for physical servers, VMware Linux machines, VMware VMs that don't have the DHCP service enables, and VMware VMs that don't have the following boot drivers: storvsc, vmbus, storflt, intelide, atapi.

After migration

After machines are migrated to Azure, there are a number of steps you should complete.

Some steps can be automated as part of the migration process using the in-built automation scripts capability in recovery plans

Post-migration steps in Azure

Perform final application and migration acceptance testing on the migrated application now running in Azure.

The Azure VM agent manages VM interaction with the Azure Fabric Controller. It's required for some Azure services, such as Azure Backup, Site Recovery, and Azure Security.

If you're migrating VMware machines and physical servers, the Mobility Service installer installs available Azure VM agent on Windows machines. On Linux VMs, we recommend that you install the agent after failover. a

If you’re migrating Azure VMs to a secondary region, the Azure VM agent must be provisioned on the VM before the migration.

If you’re migrating Hyper-V VMs to Azure, install the Azure VM agent on the Azure VM after the migration.

Manually remove any Site Recovery provider/agent from the VM. If you migrate VMware VMs or physical servers, [uninstall the Mobility service][vmware-azure-install-mobility-service.md#uninstall-mobility-service-on-a-windows-server-computer] from the Azure VM.